The Roaster Of Judges- It's A Relative Matter!

Keep those elevated from the subordinate judiciary out, and nearly half of India’s top judges are kith and kin of ex-judges and top jurists.

- Ushinor Majumdar

“The typical Indian judge is hindu, upper-class, upper-caste and male.” The statement drew a few titters at an event in the national capital late in August. But Dr Mohan Gopal, former director of the National Judicial Academy, was speaking in earnest and many in the audience, a gallery of legal luminaries, were nodding grimly. Barely 48 hours later, instead of genteel, theoretical critique, there was the scrum of a real battle. All the gavels in India’s judicial courts coming down in unison could not have restored order after the fifth seniormost judge in the Supreme Court, Justice Jasti Chelameswar, refused to attend a meeting of the SC collegium over lack of transparency and arbitrary appointment of judges.

The numbers can give pause to even an archeuphemist. The National Lawyers’ Campaign for Judicial Transparency and Reforms (NLC), the association that filed the petition, says that out of the 28 sitting judges of the Supreme Court at present, as many as nine happen to be close relatives of former judges, including a son, a grandson and a nephew of former chief justices of India. Another is the son of a former chief minister, while one is the son of a former advocate-general of a state (see box). As for India’s high courts, the petition, first filed in the SC by the NLC in 2014-15 during the NJAC case, claimed that a large representative sample from that period showed that nearly one-third of the HC judges surveyed happened to be related to sitting or former judges and legal luminaries. Their data showed that 88 HC judges out of 300 surveyed across 13 high courts fell in this category. And if one refines the field to exclude the one-third (roughly 100 out of 300) who are promoted to the bench from the lower courts—a norm followed since the British days—the pro- portion of kith and kin who are appointed judges directly from the Bar rises to almost half, the NLC petition showed.